Having a loyal customer base is an incredibly important aspect of any business, especially when it comes to those operating in the eCommerce space. Reports in the past have shown that taking a customer, retaining them, and turning them into a loyal one results in an increase in profits in the long run.

Of course, getting new customers using your app or website is great and should be included as part of your business goals. But it costs a lot less to retain a customer than to acquire a new one.

Customer retention has far more benefits to your business as well. In fact, repeat customers tend to spend around 33% more per purchase.

However, this is all much easier said than done. When it comes to the eCommerce industry there are competitors lurking around every corner. Customers expect that you maintain a good relationship with them. Tell them the things they want to hear and they’ll stay with you. But a lack of communication and care will lead to them looking elsewhere.

In this blog, we look at a few ways that can help you keep your churn rate low and your retention rate high.

User Experience

First impressions play a pretty big role in the creation of a loyal customer. If someone has a bad experience with you the first time around, it’s unlikely they’ll go back to you. So getting off on the right foot is very important.

The ease of use of your website or app is a good way to get people using your brand instead of looking elsewhere. We have seen that things like customers abandoning their carts are significantly contributing to the billions lost in revenue by eCommerce companies every year. 

This can often be put down to a confusing or laborious check out process which leads to customer frustration and then clicking the red “x” in the corner of the screen rather than the “complete purchase” button. This is not the type of activity that leads to customer retention.

As mentioned earlier, customers want their chosen brands to keep up a good relationship with them. You run the risk of them forgetting about you if you don’t nurture it. That being said, no one wants to be hounded with things that don’t interest or apply to them either.

This is why personalised messaging is so important for businesses to keep their customers engaged. Using the data at your disposal to create customer segments for sending personalised content is a great avenue to explore when it comes to your customer retention strategy. 

As well as sending personalised content to customers, you can use your data to send them messages through the channels that they most prefer.

Using Email for Retaining Customers

Email is often the go-to channel for brands when sending messages to their customers. It can be a very powerful tool and has multiple uses.

Welcome emails – sending your customers a welcome email when they first interact with your site or app is the first step in establishing a good relationship with them. This first email should be both informative and action oriented.

Cart recovery campaigns – as an eCommerce brand , you’ve probably lost a lot of potential revenue to abandoned carts. Sending an email to remind a customer of their cart and nudging them back to your website to complete their purchase is a great way to get them back using your site, and also to complete the purchase.

Cross selling and upselling – you should take the opportunity to show your customers what else you have to offer that would pair well with something they might have already purchased from your site. Generally, these post purchase emails have a 61% open rate, a 10% click through rate, and a 9% conversion rate. So they can be very beneficial when sent at the right time.

Promotions – email is always a good channel to use when sending promotions to customers. These could include limited time offers, product launches, new arrivals, etc. These types of emails can often catch the eye of the customer in their email inbox.

Sending content – writing blogs or creating other pieces of content for your customers keeps them engaged with your brand and keeps you top of mind. Email can be a good channel to use when sending your content.

Email is a very useful channel. But we always suggest that it is used as part of a multichannel approach. It can be very difficult for brands to stand out in what is now quite an overcrowded email inbox. So communicating with your customers through various different channels will make your campaigns a lot more successful.

A Multichannel Approach to Customer Retention

Understanding how a customer prefers to be communicated with is a highly important factor when it comes to customer retention.

Your use of data and insights really comes into play when creating your communication campaigns. What you send to a customer (the message) and how you send it (the channel) will determine whether they will interact with you or not.

Using multiple channels to keep your business in front of the eyes of the consumer and retain them as loyal customers is the way to go.

Essentially, there are two avenues you can go down when exploring these channels: web engagement, or mobile and app engagement. These channels are all ready to be utilised on the Xtremepush platform.

Web Engagement

Web engagement is used to target laptop, computer, and mobile website users to direct them to your site. There are three avenues you can take to get people to your site, or encourage them to stay on it.

Web Push notifications are a great way to engage with known and unknown visitors, encouraging them back on-site with real-time or scheduled notifications.

On-site messages allow you to engage with customers in real-time, while they are browsing your website. The messages can be triggered by all sorts of on-site events, like the amount of time the customer has been browsing, what pages they’ve viewed or how many, or a specific action like logging in or adding a product to their shopping cart.

The Web Inbox is an eye-catching message center that lives on your website. Messages sent to the Inbox can be permanent or semi-permanent, making it an ideal channel to share both time-sensitive offers and evergreen content.

Mobile & App Engagement

As you can probably guess, mobile engagement captures your audience’s attention through mobile devices. Generally speaking, everyone has a mobile device. So there is rarely a time where you can’t reach someone with a promotional message or notification.

App push delivers results at every stage of the customer’s mobile journey. It’s a must-have channel for any brand looking for a better ROI from their mobile app. You can add a personalised touch with gifs and emojis to help your campaign stand out even more.

In-app messages are fairly similar to on-site messages. They engage with your app users in real time with event-triggered messages delivered during their session.

Again, the app inbox operates at the same level a web inbox does. It’s still a great way to communicate time sensitive offers and content to your app users in real time.

SMS is the perfect channel for delivering urgent information that just can’t wait. It’s also a great way of communicating with those who haven’t opted into receiving push notifications. Through SMS, you know that it will 100% get to the people you want and that there will be eyes on your message. 

Overall, eCommerce brands should always be giving their customers a reason to not look anywhere else. Good quality communication through the right channels at the right time is key for customer retention.